The planet we call home, seen from 240 miles up

By Chris Lehmann

Two-hundred-forty miles above the Earth, it turns out, is a stunningly beautiful place to be. In the video above you can view Michael König's five-minute HD video montage of 18 time-lapse sequences of photographs shot from the International Space Station. The photos were taken with a "special low-light 4K-camera" by the Expedition crews 28 & 29 aboard the ISS from August through October this year. NASA's Image Science and Analysis Laboratory developed the shots, which include the Aurora Borealis Pass, an "Evening Pass" over the Sahara Desert and the Aurora Australis, which covers the sky from Madagascar to the southwest of Australia.

Along the way, you'll see giant lightning storms, massive cloud formations, webs of city lights and the constantly evolving stream of lights reflecting off of the Earth's atmosphere. It's an amazing and surreal view; all while the edges of the ISS hover at the edges of your computer screen. The first two sequences traverse over the United States at night and feature a soundtrack composed by Jan Jelinek. For an even larger version of the video and a full list of the 18 locations, follow this link over to Vimeo, where you can watch the sequence in full-screen HD. And you can find more of NASA's "Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth" here.